Surveillance, Not Waterboarding, Led to bin Laden

Updated, 12:15 p.m.

Updated again, 8:10 a.m., May 4

The torture program established by the CIA appears to have played a minor role, at most, in the intelligence effort that eventually lead to Osama bin Laden’s death. From the evidence released so far, electronic surveillance and old-fashioned intel methods were far more important.

Check out the timeline presented by an Obama administration official on Sunday. The trail starts with al-Qaida detainees captured in the early days of the war on terrorism, when the Bush administration authorized the CIA to use abusive methods like waterboarding to extract information. Detainees identified a courier for bin Laden as a “protégé” of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a “trusted assistant” of former al-Qaida #3 Abu Faraj al-Libbi. And they gave up the courier’s nom de guerre.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003, with al-Libbi following suit in 2005. A U.S. official tells the Associated Press reports that Mohammed gave up the courier’s nom de guerre, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, while in one of the CIA’s brutal “black site” prisons. As Marcy Wheeler notes, that’s not the same thing as saying the 183 waterboarding sessions Mohammed received led interrogators to the nom de guerre. But let’s be charitable to them and presume it did. According to the Washington Post, al-Libbi confirmed the alias as well.

From what we know so far, that’s about all waterboarding yielded for the hunt for al-Kuwaiti.

The senior administration official told reporters on Sunday that “for years, we were unable to identify his true name or his location.” It took until “four years ago” — 2007, then — for intelligence officials to learn al-Kuwaiti’s real name. By then, President Bush had ceased waterboarding and shuttered the black sites, moving the detainees within them, including Mohammed and al-Libbi, to Guantanamo Bay. In a Monday interview, Donald Rumsfeld said “normal” interrogation techniques were used at Gitmo on those detainees.

If this timeline is correct — and there may be a lot of adjustment to it in the days and years to come — then that means waterboarding and other abusive techniques failed to get the name out of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi. A New York Times account has both men claiming not to know even the courier’s nom de guerre, which actually may have counted as a kind of confirmation by omission in this case. That says something about the limits of brute force in interrogation.

It took more traditional sleuthing to get al-Kuwaiti’s real name, according to the Times. That meant putting more operatives on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan to track him, yielding a partial name. Once they had that, they unleashed “one of their greatest investigative tools“: the National Security Agency’s surveillance net. The NSA monitored email and phone traffic until they had his full name: Shaikh Abu Ahmed.

Last summer, the Associated Press reports, al-Kuwaiti/Ahmed made a fatal mistake: he called someone under NSA surveillance. After showing up on the grid, CIA operatives on the ground were able to hunt him. In July, CIA’s team of Pakistani informants tailed him, writing down his license plate number. That led them to the Abbottabad compound, which was off the communications grid to avoid precisely the mistake that al-Kuwaiti/Ahmed made. Even so, as my colleague David Axe explores in detail, lots of overhead surveillance tools helped U.S. intelligence isolate and understand the compound.

Everyone involved in the takedown of bin Laden can be proud of their contributions — especially the CIA, which has taken a ton of criticism for implementing the old torture program during the years after 9/11. And the torture question isn’t just an operational one, it’s a moral one: even had torture led directly to bin Laden, the morality of torture requires a separate moral judgment (as well as a legal one).

In this rather huge example, those questions appear less relevant. Waterboarding and other torture methods didn’t give the real name and location of the courier. Old fashioned human spying and electronic dragnets did that. For now, the most that can be said about the “enhanced interrogation program” is that it may have led to the nom de guerre of the courier, which got the ball rolling. That’s not nothing, and it complicates the operational case against torture. But even that is less than certain, and it hit its limits when trying to ascertain Ahmed’s real name.

If anything, the bin Laden hunt is a positive indicator for future intelligence efforts now that the “enhanced interrogation program” is over. Interrogations are now the province of joint FBI-CIA-military teams. And intelligence officials are now poring over a “mother lode” of captured hard drives from bin Laden’s compound to roll up other senior al-Qaida operatives. They won’t even have to simulate drowning someone to get them.

Update, 12:15 p.m.: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that the “magnificent” intelligence work that led to bin Laden isn’t a vindication of the the old torture program. “To the best of our knowledge, as the result of a look, none of it came from harsh interrogation practices,” Feinstein said.

“I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted,” she further told reporters on Tuesday, “and in my view, nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used.”

Second Update, 8:10 a.m., May 4: Jose Rodriguez, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, wants credit for the torture program in getting bin Laden. “Information provided by KSM and Abu Faraj al Libbi about Bin Laden’s courier was the lead information that eventually led to the location of [bin Laden’s] compound and the operation that led to his death,” Rodriguez tells Time in his first interview since retirement.